Fair Stood the Wind for France

by H. E. Bates

  They must be here, he thought, they must be somewhere. They must be. He walked down two sections of the corridor and then got out on to the platform. The four gendarmes were walking up through the train. It was seven-forty now, and he looked again into the office windows. The girl was not there.

  He walked up and down the train for some distance outside it, and then he got into it and walked up the corridor again. It was a very long train and he walked through seven coaches. It seemed to him that there was plenty of time. He wondered where the hell O’Connor could be. He knew that he could go on without O’Connor, but not without the girl. Nothing mattered without her – nothing, nothing, nothing at all. The thought of it filled him with sick panic, and he started to walk back up the train.

  The train began to move when he was halfway along it. He knew afterwards that it was a false move; there were many people still on the platform. But he did not know it then, and he began to run. He ran up two sections of corridor, with the train still moving, before he saw O’Connor.

  O’Connor was jumping off the train. He was jumping down on to the tracks as Franklin saw him, and then running across them with two of the gendarmes running after him. The train was moving fairly fast as all three of them jumped, and one of the gendarmes fell on his knees. O’Connor was running towards some coal-trucks; he went behind them and then, still running, came out again. The first gendarme was very fast, and was then about thirty yards behind O’Connor. It seemed that he would catch O’Connor very quickly. Then O’Connor made a new line, running hard across open metals between two lines of trucks, gaining a little until he reached the cover of the trucks farther on. Then Franklin saw him stop and press himself against the truck, and wait. He knew in that moment what he was going to do. The gendarme was running up past the truck, between the metals. ‘Oh, you bloody fool! You bloody, crazy fool!’ Franklin thought. A moment later O’Connor was firing with the revolver. ‘Jesus, you fool, you fool!’ Franklin thought. He saw the gendarme, about twenty yards back, fall back against the truck. ‘You fool, you fool!’ Franklin thought. ‘You poor idiotic fool! Don’t shoot any more! Don’t shoot!’ and then he saw O’Connor shooting at the gendarme for the second and third and fourth time before running on. He saw the gendarme all the time slowly slipping down until he was almost flat against the truck where O’Connor had shot him.

  The train began to slow down and then stopped again as O’Connor and the gendarmes disappeared. Franklin walked sickly back up the train. There were several excited people in the corridor, but no gendarmes at all. He pushed past, looking into all the compartments as he walked, but the girl was not there. He knew that she must be in the compartment where they had always been.

  He walked back into that compartment but she was not there. Only the Frenchwoman was sitting in the corner, still reading, but not eating now. Franklin stood vaguely in the compartment, holding the attaché case in his hand, feeling as if he were the centre of the absurd and fantastic mistake. He looked frantically out of the window. The train was just beyond the station, and the wind was blowing pieces of straw and dirty paper down the tracks.

  He felt lost and helpless as he turned to the woman in the corner.

  ‘The young woman,’ he said. ‘The girl. Please! Please! The girl who was here. Didn’t she come back?’

  The woman looked up. She looked remarkably like Miss Campbell in a younger way.

  ‘Yes. She came back.’

  ‘For God’s sake, where is she?’ he said. ‘Please, please, where is she?’

  ‘She was with gendarmes,’ the woman said. ‘Her papers were not in order. She came back to tell you that, I think.’

  ‘But what had she done to be with gendarmes?’

  Already the train was moving, but he did not notice it.

  ‘I don’t know. But I should say not much.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘She didn’t look afraid.’

  The train was moving quite fast now, and on the sidings, among the lines of trucks, there was no sign of O’Connor. He was desperate.

  ‘Did she say anything?’ he said. ‘A message? Please!’

  ‘There was no time,’ the woman said. He was not really listening now. He looked at her wildly and then beyond the windows. A new world was racing past. ‘The gendarmes took her out. There was some confusion. One of them jumped out of the train. They were all jumping about and running. Did you see? It was all very confused.’

  ‘Yes, I saw it,’ he said.

  No, he hadn’t seen it. Not that gendarme. Were all the gendarmes running? It did not matter. He walked out into the corridor. It was all over. It did not matter if all the gendarmes had jumped off the train. Nothing mattered. He did not want to talk about it now.

  He walked frantically up the corridor, carrying the attaché case. He did not want to talk about anything. He walked through the dark intersection between the coaches, swaying blindly. Then he stood by the window on the other side. The inside of himself was dead. He felt suddenly old, bitterly and vacantly old, in a way that Miss Campbell, herself so very old, would never have understood. After a few moments he felt sick, too, and opened the window and let the wind, cold and violent, blow in on his face. The trees at the foot of the mountains, dark and grey on the sunless side, were leafless. The leaves blown from them looked harsh and dry after the heat of summer. The wind sweeping down the slopes had driven them into great brown drifts in the hollows everywhere.

  He stood there for what seemed a long time before shutting the window. The cold wind blowing in so violently from the rush of the train had stung his eyes, and he shut them for a few moments, pressing his head on the glass.

  When he opened them he could see the reflection of the girl’s face, cloudy and unreal, beside his own in the window. It was for a moment part of the world racing past the train. Her face was very white, and he could not believe in the reality of it, and simply stood there watching it stupidly, as if she were a cloudy memory in the glass. Then he saw her breath forming on the cold glass, forming and dissolving and forming again in a small grey circle before the reflection of her mouth. He heard her breathing very quickly. She was breathing with little gasps of pain, as if she had been running to find him and was frightened, and she began to try to talk at the same time. He heard her say something about her papers and the gendarmes, and then about O’Connor. ‘They were taking me off the train when he saw and began to run,’ she said. She had never been able to pronounce his name in the right way, and he saw her frightened lips mumbling and faltering as she tried to say it now. ‘They began running when O’Connor ran. They all left me and began running.’

  ‘Oh God!’ he said. ‘Don’t talk, don’t talk!’

  He could not bear the agony of her frightened smile or the agony of knowing what O’Connor had done. He wanted to put his arm about her, but she was standing on his left side and there was no arm there to comfort her. He only stared at her, and then rested his face against her head and watched her bright dark eyes.

  She leaned against his empty sleeve and he let her go on crying for a long time, not trying to stop her, and as the train rushed on between trees bare and bright in the morning sun he knew that she was not crying for herself. She was not crying for O’Connor, shooting and being shot at, doing a stupid and wonderful thing for them, or because she was young, or for the terror of the moment or for joy or for the things she had left behind. She was not crying for France, or for the doctor, who represented France, or for her father, shot with his own revolver. She was not even crying for himself. He felt she was crying for something that he could never have understood without her, and now did understand because of her. Deep and complete, within himself, all these things were part of the same thing, and he knew that what she was really crying for was the agony of all that was happening in the world.

  And as he realized it there were tears in his own eyes, and because of his tears the mountains were dazzling in the sun.

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  First published by Michael Joseph 1944

  Published in Penguin Books 1958

  Published in Penguin Classics 2005

  4

  Copyright © Evensford Productions, 1958

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

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  EISBN: 978–0–141–90498–6